I recently ended 100 days without Grist. And wouldn't you know, the title of the first post I saw, "No climate for old men," spoke directly to the reason I was away.
No, I wasn't with the McCain campaign. Rather, I was immersed in a project, spearheaded by a really old man, that could become a terrific tool for beating back the climate crisis.
That man is 93-year-old Ted Kheel, legendary New York labor-lawyer-turned-environmentalist. His project is a study of the feasibility of financing free mass transit in New York City through congestion pricing and other charges on driving. I directed the study (PDF), which has just been released, and I think its implications could be huge, not just for New York but for every city in the U.S. and around the world.
Our analysis indicates that Kheel's combination of carrot (free buses, subways, and in-city commuter rail) and stick (hefty fees to drive into Manhattan south of Central Park) would work these wonders:
- twenty-five percent less traffic within the Manhattan core, and 9 percent less citywide
- an increase in person-traffic, as growth in transit trips more than offsets the drop in auto trips
- less-crowded transit, as some current subway riders shift to biking (helped by less traffic) and parallel bus and commuter rail routes (made free and faster)
- huge gains in recovered productivity from saving over a hundred million "vehicle hours" a year that are now wasted in traffic
- an annual revenue infusion of almost half a billion dollars to upgrade and expand transit
- vast new public space in the heart of the city (from reserving half of the new "traffic lanes" effectively minted by the traffic reduction)
- environmental and health benefits from decreased driving and increased walking and bicycling.
Helping build these impressive benefits is a set of gorgeous synergies, like this one involving transit buses: under the Kheel Plan, as we call it, when you get on a bus, you don't have to pay a fare. Not only is that nice for you, but it speeds up everybody's ride -- no more fumbling at the door for your fare card. This in turn makes the buses more attractive to people who might otherwise drive or take cabs, which makes for less traffic, which speeds bus travel and attracts still more riders. Where will the buses come from to handle the load? They're here now; the numbers tell us that buses will be able to make six runs in the time it now takes them to do five.
Ah, the numbers. The mammoth job of putting them together is what forced me off Grist (and other fun stuff) for months. To trace the simultaneous impacts of free transit and driving fees, we built an ingenious computer model that accounts for interactions between traffic volumes and speeds, and captures the effect of price changes and time savings on travel choices (transit, auto, taxi, and bike). The model is actually a computer spreadsheet with 30 linked compartments passing thousands of parameters (numbers) and equations back and forth. Yet it's fully transparent. All assumptions are revealed, and users are enabled to make their own pricing choices. Hey you math heads and policy wonks out there, download the spreadsheet and have a look!
While this work was going on, we were racing the clock. As even many non-New Yorkers know, last year Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed his own milder congestion pricing plan ($8 car entry fee instead of our $16; no letup in transit fare hikes), touching off a legislative forced march to satisfy a federal funding deadline. Although the Kheel Plan was a bit too revolutionary to get considered in this round, we've succeeded in placing it in the civic consciousness. Whether Bloomberg's plan is enacted or not, we have a shot at making free transit a big issue in the 2009 municipal elections.
What does the Kheel Plan have to do with rescuing the climate? Not what you might think -- the direct CO2 savings from the drop in driving are modest, just a few percent of total citywide emissions. The Kheel Plan's climate benefits arise from making New York City vital and livable enough to accommodate new residents and businesses that would otherwise gravitate to suburbs that don't share the city's structural bias toward carbon efficiency. Needless to say, blazing a path for other world cities could multiply those climate benefits a hundred-fold.
I turned 60 last year. Once or twice, contemplating the climate crisis, I've had to pull myself back from thinking, "At least I won't be around when it all hits the fan." But here's Ted Kheel, burning through his 90s, pouring heart and soul into a vision that he may not be around to see made real.
Maybe the climate is something for old men after all.
To download the Kheel Report and spreadsheet, go to www.nnyn.org/kheelplan.
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Comments
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Liz Borkowski Posted 6:14 am
11 Feb 2008
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johnmcc793 Posted 10:47 pm
11 Feb 2008
Congratulations.
You are now, also, an urban legend.
John McCormick
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NBKBoston Posted 1:48 am
13 Feb 2008
But there is a flaw in the model which I think undermines some of its key conclusions -- especially the conclusion that enough revenue can be raised through its basket of proposals to replace the mass transit fairbox.
The problem stems from the that the cost-per-ride element in the model did not account for the increased parking costs brought on by the parking reform element of the proposal. While the written report notes that the model indeed ignores this, the results of the omission are hardly insignificant.
There are two ways the parking reform element increases parking costs on drivers. The first is that increaseing the per-hour rate, and the number of spaces governed by meters, takes money from motorists and gives it to the government. This is estimated at $700m/year in the budgeting section of the model, which amounts to roughly $3 per trip, on average, for current traffic volumes -- a bit more if volumes fall on the increased cost. If you counted this extra cost into the total price per trip (which you haven't), the elasticity of demand says that you'd have fewer trips, lower toll revenues, and less money for the subways. That's problem one, and it is only of moderate size.
The second way in which the parking reform element affects total trip costs is significantly larger. With the proposed high hourly cost of meters, and the proposed severe reduction in the number of non-metered spaces, motorists planning on spending more than a few hours in the city will no longer hunt for a free space, and will simply park in a private garage at $30/day or more -- still cheaper than the streets. By being pushed into garages, even more costs will be borne by motorists, on the whole. This will drive down demand, but those payments will not go to the government for use on mass transit; the money will go to private parking operators instead.
One way to estimate the impact of this second mechanism is to go to the "price to drive" and "future costs" section of the model and specify that the proportion of drivers who pay market rate for parking (either at the newly-expensive meters or in private garages) will go from the current level of 40% to a post-reform level of, say, 80%. This adds a total of about $9 to the cost of each trip. Based on my previous points, we can say that $3 goes to public meters, while $6 goes to private operators. That increase in price will cut traffic significantly already, and most of that money won't even go to the government. And we cannot go back and say that the government will actually collect much more than $700m/year, because that figure is based on the number of curbside spots that exist, multiplied by the hourly rate and a relatively high occupancy factor (75%).
After seeing a $9 increase in cost per trip (of which only $3 goes to the government), you are only left with $7 more dollars to toll until you reach the $16 level. And that doesn't provide the revenue one needs to make transit free.
Basically, you really need to model the parking reform proposal with a lot more detail and seriousness before the rest of the model can be seen to really hold up. One complexity I see with trying to model parking costs per trip is the possibility of "type shifting." With increased parking costs, fewer people will drive to Manhattan and park for the day. But more people than at present might drive for a quick visit and leave without paying for too much parking. So it may be that the parking reform proposal will not push up per-trip parking costs by quite as much as $9, though at $8/hour for virtually all curbside parking, I don't see it being much lower, unless many trips to Manhattan just become through-trips. But we need a more fine-grained approach to analyzing trip purpose and duration to really find out.
Or you could abandon the parking proposal, but that would have other effects on the assumptions used in the model -- notably on the last $700m in revenue which puts the free transit idea in the black by about $450m, instead of in the hole by $350m.
The model is a fun toy, but I won't be voting for a $16 congestion charge, radical parking reform, and free subways (as a package) when I move to New York just on its say-so.
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Charles Komanoff Posted 6:59 am
14 Feb 2008
Thanks for your terrific comment. We're thrilled that you dug deep into the BTA (our spreadsheet model), and we appreciate (and are impressed) that you spotted a flaw in it and took the trouble to point it out.
Yes, we did err by taking "revenue credit" for parking fees without reflecting their price-impact on the number of tolled trips and, hence, on toll revenues. That's a classic case of double-counting that we missed in our rush to crunch the numbers and get the report out.
But I differ with you on the magnitude of the impact. As you can see by running the BTA, adding $3 to the average cost of a CBD trip (as you did, by allocating the $700M in new parking revenue across the number of such trips) would eliminate just 7% of current car trips into the CBD (48,500 daily out of 680,000 -- excludes taxis). That in turn should reduce the revenue we projected from automobiles, $2,264M, by 7%, or $160M per year. While that's not insignificant, it still leaves 2/3 of our net revenues available for transit.
Moreover, I think a case can be made that even the 7% may err on the high side, since some of that $700M in revenue would derive from trucks rather than autos.
(I didn't find your garage scenario persuasive, BTW, for reasons I'd be happy to spell out at another time.)
We're committed to integrating parking charges into the demand analysis, as part of a comprehensive upgrade of our model. "BTA 2.0" will include many enhancements, including time-of-day varied cordon tolls, optional peak pricing of subway service, more finely tuned and integrated parking (as just noted), and sophisticated traffic-impact calculations based on "V/C ratios."
Please contact us off-line -- you obviously have a keen eye for this work and we'd like to get connected with you. Meanwhile, thanks very much for communicating our modeling flaw, not to mention the collegial way you talked about it. We really appreciate it.
Charles
http://www.komanoff.net
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